Bev Tappan

Category: Poems

All poems

  • ONE MORNING AFTER A SLEET STORM

    The moon was a whitegold earring
    Worn by a frosted fir
    While ice chimes clinked and jingled
    His thoughts were all of her.

    Sunrise pale and leaden
    Embraced the silver rim
    Of the rime-encrusted woodland.
    Her thoughts were all of him.

  • KEYSTONE DEC ’89

    When Venus burns
    beneath the moon
    And dawn ignites
    the mountain snow
    My thoughts will always
    turn to you
    And I’ll be thankful
    for our love

  • REFLECTIONS: CONSTRAINTS

    Songs in the car, my mother’s mellow contralto
    The white fringe of birches framing Lake Chocorua
    Her trudge up the Jewell Trail wearing a dress:
    Calling out blazes on granite slabs
    Spying the next cairn, the misty channel
    Marker – or so I like to recall although
    In truth my father may have been ahead.

    How I resented the leash that reined me to them
    After my toddler’s wobble toward the road
    Where Model T’s jolted like windup toys.
    The clothesline pulley ran me like a dog.
    I was the bass my father trolled for what
    Seemed hours in lucid lakes of northern Maine.
    “You are all we’ve got, ” he often said
    Spanking me whenever I crossed the street.

    Today my mother came home from the hospital
    Short of breath, unsure of the order of pills.
    I cooked and laundered, fetched her water and kleenex
    And snapped at the choke chain tightening on my neck
    The way our shepherd balks at the door of the pen
    Until we looked at curling photographs:
    Her home-made lacy graduation dress
    The boy with his bicycle twenty-five miles from home.

  • REFLECTIONS: DAILY REMINDERS – MAY 28, 1989

    Unruffled sheets on half the bed
    Manure and compost piles unspread
    No woodchips on upholstered chairs
    No wads of mud on cellar stairs

    A pair of running shoes unfilled,
    The ergometer counter stilled
    Computer monitor unscribed,
    Animal carvings undefined

    The silent eight-day clock unwound,
    No need to ring the dinner gong
    No answer to the office phone,
    A truck with no commute from home

    The waxplant tolls its heavy blooms
    Their midnight scent invaded the rooms.

  • REFLECTIONS: COUNTERPOINT

    I ask myself why Baroque music
    Is the music for me
    Why not Tchaikovsky but W.A. Mozart
    Is my main man
    And not just for the horn passages
    Sweet as they are

    Stravinsky says all eighteenth century
    Music is to dance by.
    It’s true my feet prance off without me
    At the opening measure
    Of any toe-tapping tune and especially
    Contra dancing

    Where men and women take their turns
    Meet and separate
    Do their things and greet their friends
    Together and apart
    Grand right and left and swing your partner
    On equal terms.

    Baroque music is like that: two voices
    Male and female
    In animated cross-talk. The flute
    Makes a remark.
    The harpsichord agrees and amplifies

    Or the bas viol asks a question
    The violin responds
    And off they go in joyful repartee.
    If daughters could talk
    With fathers like that they’d grow up
    To be happy women.

  • REFLECTIONS: HELGA’S SONNET

    He garlands her with white arbutus in spring
    And she is Frigga, Venus of Scandinavia.
    Through drowsy summer days he paints
    Her flesh pearly and smooth as silken linings
    Of conch shells, her long limbs loose in sleep.
    But fall diminishes her. A lesser wood nymph
    Under a maple leaf, Persephone sliding
    Back into earth, she moves away from him.
    Against the black winter oak in her army
    Cape she deflects his gaze with the icy eyes
    Of Freyja, Prussian queen of slaughtered warriors.
    Over the years his drybrush explores the ripened
    Wheat of her hair, the Viking angles of her features.
    The unsmiling mouth at last defeats him.

  • REFLECTIONS: THE SUNSET YEARS

    That season of my life I now can savor
    When goldenrod on every back road border
    Ignites its solar flares, and purple asters
    Lift their wine in one last toast to summer.

    My sugar maple leaves illuminate
    The swamps where darning needles copulate.
    My milkweed pods are tightly packed to labor
    And let fly seeds on any passing vapor.

    Meteors arc across my inner spaces.
    Unblemished roses baptize me with fragrance.
    The wild geese point to south my weather vane
    This is the time for riding hurricanes

    Before the tawny grasses crystallize
    Before the long dark winter nights arrive.

  • TRAVELS: GIBRALTER

    Several months ago, the British
    Unlocked the mainland border gates.
    Workers can go freely home at night.
    Tourists cross by bus as well as boat.
    Spain has access to her own peninsula

    The taxi takes us mile by mile
    Into the garrisoned warren, the tunneled
    Ant like arsenal. Pirates, moors,
    Spanish, Germans, British and French
    Drowned in flames for this barren rock.

    Within numberless caves carved
    By wind and water, some as vast
    And domed as cathedrals, limestone pillars
    Refracting thin aeolian chimes,
    Neanderthal families gathered by their fires.

  • TRAVELS: PERUVIAN PORTRAITS

    Patrician as a Spanish grandee,
    The Andean grandfather gazes
    At llamas, alpacas and sheep
    Weighing their fleece. His mouth
    Is firm under a Roman nose.
    Long eartlaps of a knitted
    Chulpa frame angular
    Cheekbones and a gray moustache.

    He no longer plays soccer,
    Inhaling the sparse oxygen:
    His air fuel- injected
    By high-octane hemoglobin.
    His chest is now concave.
    The serape slopes over shoulders That will carry the village sheep
    At Sunday mass to the padre.

    His wife has worked up a smile
    For her grandson the artist, eyes Squinting in sunlight unshaded
    By the upright salad bowl,
    A scarlet melon slice,
    Crowning her gray hair.
    Rolled into a warm collar,
    Her blanket comforts old bones.

    She keeps her hands busy
    Pulling and twisting wool
    On a spindle. She often laughs
    With neighbors at weekly markets
    Buying potatoes and beans or
    Sipping a glass of chicha.
    She pacifies great grandbabies
    with chunks of sugar cane.

  • NEW ENGLAND: APRIL IN NORTH STONINGTON

    On Lantern Hill the shadbush blooms
    And clouds meander overhead.
    The rocks are rough beneath my boots
    The lichens stiff beneath my hand.

    A small black-suited butterfly
    Imbibes the blossoms airy mead.
    I watch the redtails hover by
    Stretch out my legs and take my ease.

    I’ve heard that when the shadbush blows
    The shadfish breast New England stream
    Their frail white petals brush my nose
    Among the still-emerging leaves.

  • TRAVELS: SAINT JOHN

    John Muir danced over glaciers. He
    Hunkered down to chat with new
    Acquaintances among the plant people and
    Grieved when they drowned in damned reservoirs.

    Coatless, he bedded under bent boughs,
    Warmed by climate-changing campfires.
    Emerson missed his invitation to breathe
    The star-spangled midnight air.

    Thoreau would have leaped onto the ledge
    Behind the waterfall to view the moon bow.
    “Hang on,” John tells us. “Jam your fist
    In the crack. Scrabble for toeholds.

    Sway in the storm, rooted in wildness Eat apples and look at the larkspur, ” As his mother advised. Above all,
    “Savor the taste of good bread. “

  • TRAVELS: SEQUOIAS

    Just to know they are there,
    Earth’s gentle giants:
    Gripping the ground with aged
    Swollen joints, mahogany
    Leathered, hairy, wide
    As a circle of sixteen people outspread arms, cloning
    Their young, cedary skyscrapers
    Journeying back and forth
    As we explore from our roots:
    Calmly outliving, ignoring
    The rise and fall of nations
    Quiets the racing pulse
    Unwinds the atomic clock.